- Have you ever seen “~=” or “!=” used in Spotfire expressions and not know what this syntax means?
Since I am in Houston this week working in the Ruths.ai office helping to update training, my blog post is going to be a bit short. I thought I would focus on custom expression syntax the Excel turned Spotfire expert might not be familiar with.
- “~=” means contains
- “!=” mean not equal to
The “~=” is especially helpful when you are trying to pull a few words or specific characters out of a long string of text. In the screen shot below I am looking at Lending Club data on loans, and one of the columns available is called emp_title that represents the borrower’s job title. In the screen shot below, I used an IF statement to identify borrowers working in banking. Even though their title may be long and wordy, I can test against just the word “bank”.
If([emp_title]~=”bank”,”FINANCE”,”OTHER”)
The syntax “!=” is the same as <>. However, I wanted to point it out because I’ve seen it used in blog posts, and it helpful for users to understand.
In the same data set, there is a column called loan_status that has 9 different statuses. I have used the IF statement shown below to consolidate those statuses into only two statuses using “!=”.
If([loan_status]!=”Fully Paid”,”Outstanding”,”Fully Paid”)
In the coming weeks, I’ll be putting up posts about using relations and column matches, and then a series on interpreting the results of Spotfire’s predictive models. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me at julie@bigmountainanalytics.com. Have a good week!
Guest Spotfire blogger residing in Whitefish, MT. Working for SM Energy’s Advanced Analytics and Emerging Technology team!